Indie Game: The Movie: The TV Series

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I guess indie games are about to become glamorous. The long-awaited documentary Indie Game: The Movie, which is currently touring film festivals and getting a very positive buzz indeed, is apparently to become a telly series from HBO, home of the Sopranos, The Wire et al. As in, a dramatic TV series, with actors pretending to be indie developers, rather than actual indie developers mumbling to camera. Knowing HBO, it’ll be hyper-glossy and filled with arguably unnecessary sex scenes. Will we get to see the bum of a man pretending to be Edmund McMillen? Will we see a nervous Andy Schatz analogue being led to the IGF casting couch? Will we see the origin of Jonathan Blow’s name? Oh God, I’d really better stop now.
We don’t know much, as it’s really only at the ‘optioned’ stage right now, but HBO uber-producer Scott Rudin plans to remake Indie Game: The Movie as a half-hour comedy series. My blood chilled at that prospect – are they hoping to repeat the mugging horror of The Big Bang Theory but with slacker game devs? Or maybe it’ll be more of a lo-fi, Curb Your Enthusiasm kinda thing. Which would be more promising – my fear, though, is that the entire makin’ indie games thing is treated purely as a ‘oh, young people today’ joke rather than a noble, artistic endeavour. On the other hand, doing solely the latter would be a sad mistake too, given there is much to laugh about/with in the making-it-up-as-you-go-along nature of indie game dev.

Update: the makers of the movie claim the series will not be a comedy after all. Said they on Facebook:

“HBO has optioned IGTM for the basis of a (fictional) series. It is NOT a comedy. It is NOT a sitcom. The information came out and someone filled in a blank, and this is why: The (potential) show is being developed within the 1/2 hour department within HBO. We are told that 1/2 hr department is often shorthanded ‘comedy department’. Full hour dept = ‘drama department’. That is the basis of the ‘Comedy’ label. The show is being produced by Scott Rudin – the producer of ‘The Social Network’, ‘True Grit’, ‘Moneyball’, ‘Dragon Tattoo’ & nearly everything Wes Anderson… The people involved, the network involved – all are, BY FAR, the best people possible to make this show.”

Which puts an entirely different spin on things. Anyway: this may well never happen as it’s still only in the planning stages, but the mere concept of indie games being given a large dramatic budget and a DVD boxset is extraordinary, and says much about the games industry’s turnaround in recent years. As for the original film itself, here’s the most recent trailer:

Can’t wait to see it, but mostly that trailer just makes me so damned sad that Fez isn’t coming to PC.

I’m sure a year or so after the xbox release we’ll see it end up on PC. The problem is they sign away their souls in these ridiculous Microsoft contracts, and maybe he just doesn’t want to risk angering the console overlords by talking about future, none Microsoft controlled platform releases.

If it really does never come to PC it’ll be a stupid move. Time and time again these games find their 100k-200k (bar a couple of notable exceptions) sale limit on the console toy and then smash it later on with the pc release breaking 400k-500k.

With a quality downloadable indie game you can smash the 1m mark for revenue if you release on PC and console. If you go console exclusive, you’ll be luckily to make 500 grand (which would still be a great haul for your average indie dev, but no cool 1m).

The darling of [some of] the indie gaming movement, with the movement’s message of creative freedom, being restricted by contracts signed with the world’s largest software company is quite … something?

Still, Fez looks like it’ll be an interesting game.
Also the programmer’s a nice guy, sharing his research and experiments freely.

That’s what I wanted to point out as well: It probably won’t be a comedy series.
People just made that assumption because the format will be 30 minutes, which is usually reserved for the comedy departement on HBO. That’s not necessarily the case for this one, though.

Meh.
I don’t care if they want to poke fun at indie game developers. I don’t care if games are considered ‘art’ byt the guardian and sunday times either.

I make a decent living doing what i love, with no boss, and work from home. people can make out that indie devs are clueless slackers for all i care, as long as people keep buying the games, why should I, or any of the rest of us care what the increasingly irrelevant ‘main stream media’ thinks about games?

Forgive my cynicism, but shaky camera, short depth of field, cloying music; looks like indie games is going to have the same associations with middle-class angst as indie music and indie films, which I don’t think it necessarily deserves.

And I know indie games aren’t just platform games. Good lord I hope the film includes something from a different genre.

Ah… don’t you get it? “Indie” is now a scene, much like the term is used for the musical genre. It has nothing to do with how games are developed or distributed. Some of the greatest “Indie” bands are actually signed to multinational publishers, like The Flaming Lips on Warner for example.

Even looking at IGF Awards and their choices for nominations, the type of games that get most coverage in blogs, you can tell how the indie scene is split into “hip” and obscure. Are games distributed through Microsoft really indie? Can they ever compete in coverage with titles distributed by their own developers alone?

Of course there will be cases like 2D Boy and Mojang where their games became a huge success out of nowhere but that kind of things happen to what? 0.1% of games? I don’t doubt those that succeed commercially are not worth it, but these cases of success don’t make the whole indie game development story.

Well, if it’s being overseen by the same man who produced all of Wes Anderson’s work . . . I shudder to think what could be. I like to think of the independent games community as a warm and vibrant place.

1. Overblown sentimentality
2. Only american games. Minecraft is getting it’s own film, fair enough, but what about Amnesia, Limbo, VVVVVV, etc? I appreciate that it’s low budget, but feel it should be called “US Indie Game: The Movie”. But then it’s a US film, meaning it’s valid to suppose USA = The World
3. Stupid glasses.

Well that sounds rubbish; indie developers are actually available and communicating properly and effectively with their audience, all we need is a few “drama” induced total misunderstandings to get indie developers wound up with misunderstandings, and we could set stuff back years.

Or it could actually be insightful and ok, but my goodness, the film, and actually reading the blogs of designers, sounds a 100% better idea than watching some scriptwriter’s idea of what would be more interesting than their actual lives.